


Deadline

by Ripley2win



Series: Moonlight Holidays [1]
Category: Moonlight (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-16
Updated: 2010-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-10 14:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ripley2win/pseuds/Ripley2win
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"His freshies walked softly and spoke quietly around Josef the entire week before Halloween.  Josef's friends tried to avoid him, even Mick.  On Halloween evening, Josef again woke cranky."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deadline

Deadline

My thanks to Charles Dickens.  
Post Sonata

None of the Moonlight characters belong to anyone but their orignal creators. I'm just playing with them. No infringement intended.

 

His freshies walked softly and spoke quietly around Josef the entire week before Halloween. Josef's friends tried to avoid him, even Mick. On Halloween evening, Josef again woke cranky. He drank quickly with no regard for his freshies feelings and sent all his freshies out of the house for the evening. Worried freshies sent in Josef's driver, Bob Ratchet, to check on him.

"Happy Halloween, Mr. Kostan"

"Say one more word about Halloween and I will personally remove your fringe benefits," Josef said as he pointed below Bob Ratchet's belt. "Just go away, go home."

"OK," Bob said as he slowly backed out of the room. "Call me at home if you need me, Boss."

Josef's eyes felt very heavy. The font size of the stock analysis seemed to grow smaller and smaller as Josef's eyes felt heavier and heavier. He had closed his eyes for just a moment when he was disturbed by a unexpected cacophony coming from the piano in the next room. Josef jumped up to see what moron had disturbed his rest.

"Hello, my friend."

A familiar figure stood in front of the piano. Josef, speechless and confused, looked at the piano keys through the spectral body of the deceased vampire he had known as Ames, his Sire.

"I died too soon, Josephus Nonatus. There is much more I wished to teach you, things of the spirit."

No one alive today knew Josef's birth name and the meaning behind it. "You aren't really here. You're only in my mind. Why would I go crazy after all these centuries?"

His ghostly visitor said "I am in your mind, but that doesn't mean I'm not real."

Josef dropped to the couch and tried to collect his thoughts. Ames sat beside him. The physical proximity was intended as a comfort, but Josef's thoughts were hung up on little details such as seeing the detailed embroidery of the cushion through the bottom of his visitor's translucent anatomy.

"Josephus, you . . ."

"Call me Josef."

"Your immortality is fleeting as with all creatures. You have wasted your gift of time." Josef tried to interrupt but couldn't get a word in. "All you have accomplished is to collect whatever trinkets your current era deems valuable. Spiritually you know less than a child, less than when I turned you. Sometime in the last four centuries you have lost misplaced your Soul."

Ames paused and looked down upon Josef with a gaze tinged with pity. "This evening you will be visited by three spirits who will assist in your spiritual education. Do not mistake their appearances to be what they seem. Their facades were chosen with your education in mind. Josef, do not fail me for it will mean that you have failed yourself at the time of your greatest need. You must find your Soul before sunrise at 6:13 a.m."

The ghost of Josef's sire vanished. A glowing, golden orb now stood in Ames' place. When the orb solidified it was a spirit that looked like Sara. She looked into Josef's eyes deeply and quietly sighed.

"Josef, Josef. We must change your attitude." He looked upon her beautiful face and remembered how much the real Sara had taught him. Josef didn't have the heart to argue with her.

"How?"

"By visiting your past and making peace with it." Sara held our her hand to Josef . He took it and together they took a single step into Josef's past.

Carved pumpkins were stationed near the front door of every house in the village. The air was heavy with the scent of baked goods and roasted meats. Sara and Josef stood unseen near a small boy who had been chased and beaten by the other children, and taunted as "a mother killer", "unborn evil". Sara gave Josef a questioning look so he decided to explain the taunt.

"My mother had a stroke during my delivery and I was cut from her dead body. My father could not stand the sight of me and gave me to the church orphanage to raise. I was 4 at the time of this beating. My father died shortly after this incident." Josef paused, unsure how much he wanted to reveal of himself.

"Father Angelico, our priest, became a second father to me. Over time I convinced him that I had a genuine vocation to be a priest as well. I was scheduled to leave for the seminary when I met Ames and saved him from a torch-bearing mob."

"Josef, you risked his life to save Ames' life. Why?"

"I didn't know any better at the time."

"He seduced you from your chosen path?"

"No, I chose this life with my eyes open. It's just . . ." Josef paused for a long moment trying to find the words to describe the emptiness of a vampire life so he changed the subject.

"Ames was 1000 years old when we met. He spoke with intimate knowledge of history. He LIVED through the Arthurian era. He was there! I was seduced by Ames' knowledge. So I asked to be turned. At first, our relationship was an intellectual bond and then deeper friendship. He eased me very gently over the last barriers."

Are you angry at your Sire, Josef?"

"No, I'm more angry at myself than Ames." Sara stayed silent and waited for Josef to find the words that had been buried in his heart for a very long time. "Yes . . . I AM angry at him." Josef seemed surprised at his own feelings. "He never prepared me for the loneliness. Ames had lived such a long time that he grew tired of living. Turning me gave him a renewed interest in life but only for another 50 years. He wanted to die. I couldn't change him or heal him. So I left him to die."

"What happened to Ames?"

"Ames died of carelessness. Eventually he was killed by another torch-bearing mob."

"Why are you angry at yourself, Josef?"

"After Ames died, I promised myself I would never get close to a human and never turn anyone." Sara remained silent. "I broke my oath, not just once but twice." His voice was low and Josef bit his words off sharply as if trying to kill his words. "First, Sara begged me to turn her. Decades later Mick begged me to turn him."

"You complied with their wishes. What is so wrong with that?"

"Condemning them to the kind of life Ames had at the end?"

Sara decided to change the subject. "What's the best thing Ames ever did for you, Josef?"

"He gave me the world, all its history and all of his experiences unashamedly and completely. I saw so much through his eyes. He was a good man but in the end he lost the will to live."

"Can you forgive Ames his weakness at the end of his life?"

Josef rubbed his hands over his eyes and simply said "I love him and I miss him."

Sara took Josef's hand and together they stepped back into the present. Josef looked around at the familiar surroundings and let out a big sigh of relief. He turned to speak with the spirit that looked like Sara but she was not there. A silver orb shimmered next to Josef and slowly settled into a human form. The second spirit visitor looked like Beth, but wasn't.

"Are you going to be as much of a pain in the ass as the real Beth?" Josef asked the spirit.

"You bet I will be."

Josef groaned softly as he sat down on the sofa. He looked at Beth out of the corner of his eyes and wondered what she was supposed to teach him.

"What brings you joy, Josef?" He raised his eyebrow and gave Beth his best lecherous smile. "I'm not asking what you do for fun. Joy comes from connecting with the world around you and KEEPING your clothes on."

"If we use your definition . . . then I haven't experienced joy in a very long time."

"Let's find joy right now, Josef." The spirit held her hand out to Josef. Hesitantly, he took her hand and wondered where the hell they were going.

Josef and the spirit appeared on a moonlit beach. He recognized Mick and Beth as the couple on the blanket. They sat close to each other and spoke quietly. Mick held up a plump strawberry to Beth's lips. Beth nibbled while refilling Mick's glass of wine.

"Why wouldn't they have joy! They have each other."

"OK, bad example. Let's try a different person."

They appeared in front of an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood which had been elaborately decorated for Halloween. Josef could discern that both humans and vampires were running a neighborhood haunted house. Bob Ratchet, Josef's driver, was the chief organizer and candy giver. Josef recognized several of his favorite freshies dressed as zombies and mutilated corpses at the haunted house. Laughter and screams and squeals of surprise drifted through from the haunted house erected on Bob's front yard.

Josef stood invisibly next to Bob as he handed out candy and Halloween trinkets. Every child's "trick or treat" to Bob received a heartfelt "Happy Halloween" in return.

"He hasn't changed much since we met during the Civil war." Josef didn't choose to sire Bob but instead asked a friend of his, Rachael Gallant, to sire Bob. Even though their meetings would be separated by many decades, Bob turned up in random places and times in Josef's life.

"Tell me what you think of Bob," Beth asked.

"He's the most satisfied individual I've ever met. Whatever he chooses to to, he IS happy to do it. He's been a valet, a shoemaker, a tailor and heaven only knows what else." Josef was silent for a long time as he watched the endless parade of small children and rowdy teenagers accept candy and try their luck in the Haunted House. "It's as if he knows something I don't."

"Bob hasn't let being undead keep him from living, and loving and giving back to the world," Beth said. Josef nodded agreement.

Without transition or warning, Josef found himself back in his own home sitting on the sofa. His third spirit visitor appeared at first as a spinning red orb. Her form quickly stabilized next to him. Her blackened and seared features seemed to stare deeply into his being. Josef vamped out instinctively. She looked like Emma, but Josef knew better. He had watched Emma die.

"Come with me," the spirit that looked like Emma said. She held out her bony and blackened hand to Josef. He reached for her hand hesitantly at first, then quickly and defiantly.

"Lead on," Josef answered. Together they took one step forward to confront Josef's past. They appeared in the midst of a wake held for a teenage girl.

"Do you recognize this scene, Josef?"

Reluctantly Josef nodded. "This death was accidental. I was clumsy and fed too long. She was . . . an incredibly sweet girl." They watched the mourning for a moment before speaking.

"She was just the first of many deaths, Josef. At least she was the first and last accidental death on your conscience."

"I don't have a conscience."

"Yes you do. Buried but it still exists. That's why I am here. It has become too easy for you to kill."

Suddenly Josef was alone and on a night street in current-day Los Angeles. Bodies rose from the Tar Pits and circled around Josef. He ran with vampire speed from the corpses covered in oily slime. Every few minutes Josef looked over his shoulder as he ran. The pack seemed larger every time he looked back. He was running from the corpses of everyone he has ever killed.

Josef woke still seated on the coach, still holding the stock analysis in his hands, grateful to be alive. He called Mick.

"Meet me at Bob's house, Mick"

"I'm kind of busy right now Josef. How about tomorrow night?"

"Get the sand out of your shorts and meet me at Bob's house. Now. Please. Oh, bring Blondie with you. See you there in 30 minutes."

Josef called Bob to let him know he had some extra helpers for his haunted house. He was looking forward to scaring the crap out of kids at Bob's haunted house.


End file.
